


Bachelor’s Button

by APgeeksout



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Alternate Universe - Romance Novel, Alternate Universe - Western, Amnesia, Background Relationships, Cameos by Additional WWE Characters, F/M, M/M, Mail Order Brides, Marriage of Convenience
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-29 19:52:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15736242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/pseuds/APgeeksout
Summary: “Rancher Dean Ambrose ’s mail-order bride turned up with a huge bump on her forehead and a case of amnesia. Renee Young didn’t know that she’d agreed to a marriage in name only! But handsome Dean certainly aroused her interest.”For Unconventional Courtship 2018, based on a summary for Harlequin romanceMontana Mail-Order Wifeby Charlotte Douglas.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is set nebulously in late 19th century Montana, but firmly in West Romancelandia. Amnesia, cattle-ranching, and Victorian-era frontier social mores almost certainly wouldn’t work like this, except in service of opportunities for pining and happy endings.

“Do you ever feel like you’re weathering a storm?”

“I suppose everyone does at some point, don’t they?” Renee replied noncommittally.

It turned out she needn’t have bothered. The blowhard sprawled across the bench opposite her carried on without regard for the interest or input of the stagecoach’s other occupants.

She traded a commiserating glance with the burly gentleman seated beside her and reached for the valise at her feet, in desperate search of something to occupy her mind beyond her fellow passenger’s insistence that the traveling troupe that had unceremoniously ejected him from its wagons would come to rue the loss of Alex Riley’s motivating rage.

As the stage creaked and rocked along the trail - if not endless, it certainly felt far longer than she had imagined when she set out from Toronto - she found herself wishing that she'd kept the little bundle of letters from Mr. Ambrose closer to hand instead of secreted away in her trunk, presently lashed somewhere onto the outside of the coach and inaccessible to her.

She was confident in the arrangement they'd struck, satisfied of its mutual benefit - she, finally gaining unfettered access to her inheritance; he, free of the eligible bachelor status that apparently weighed on him heavily enough to persuade him to answer her unconventional advertisement. Still, she might have enjoyed seeing it set out again, taking shape on the page in Mr. Ambrose's scrawling but serviceable hand. It would have been cheering to read over the lines where he’d described the terms of her grandfather’s will as “HORSE SHIT” before hatching the phrase out in favor of something only slightly more decorous.

The stage gave a lurch beneath her, as though the team had put on a sudden burst of speed, and a heavy hand rapped against the outside of the compartment. “Riders approaching from North and South,” the Wells Fargo agent called in to them from his perch next to the driver. “Keep low and hang tight.”

“Maybe they’re enthusiastic autograph-seekers?” Riley said, clambering in his seat to peer out the window. “Word of my ill-use could be spreading even more quickly than I hoped!”

All the irritations of this final leg of the journey solidified into one scathing retort that Renee felt forming, bitter and sweet on the back of her tongue. Then, there was the repeated crack of gun fire - from both extremely close and a bit farther off - and alarmingly shrill protests from the horses, and then the coach jolted sharply enough to dash her out of her seat, and her words faded from her grasp along with all other awareness.


	2. Chapter 2

"So," Roman said, and took another sip of coffee from his enameled cup, as though he thought he was making convincingly casual small-talk, "the stage is due in today?"

"Sure is." Dean hid his mouth behind a gulp from his own mug, unsure whether his expression would be a grin at Roman's lack of subtlety or a grimace at the uncomfortable conversation his brother was apparently determined they should have. At least he'd waited until the rest of the breakfast crew had cleared out. "Taking the buggy in to town around noon to meet it. You need anything while I'm there?"

Roman frowned at him - the same dark-eyed, sort-of-furious-but-mostly-sad look he got when Dean took a fool's dare to ride a nasty bull or waded into the short side of a dirty, uneven fight or let a fever burn until he fainted right out of his saddle - and set his cup down heavily enough to slosh a little onto the table between them. "I need you to tell me you're sure about this," he said. "It's not too late to just put this lady up at the hotel for a few days and cover her fare back home."

“After she’s come all this way to help me out?” He drained his cup and pushed away from the table to add it to the stack in the dishpan. “How am _I_ the one who ended up with the reputation for bad manners?”

Roman just stared him down in amused silence until he copped to that charge.

"Yeah, OK, that's probably fair." He winged a damp rag at Roman, who caught it easily and began to mop up his spill.

"What exactly is she helping you to do, besides give up?" he asked, and tossed the rag back at Dean.

"'Give up', huh? That's pretty rich, coming from you," he said, and Roman looked stung, his suddenly-stony gaze falling from Dean’s face to the dregs in his cup. Dean winced. “That was a low blow. Sorry, brother.”

Roman waved off the apology. “I’ve had worse.” He sighed. “So, tell me again how this is going to be good for you?”

“It’s gonna be _great_ for me,” he corrected, and started reeling the steps of the plan off on his fingers as he went. “Miss Renee Young rolls into town on the stage. She sticks around being charming for long enough that word gets around the territory that I’m sweet on her. We get hitched. She goes back to Toronto.” He paused to dramatically press a hand to his chest. “So far as anyone knows, she takes my heart with her, and, last but not least, all the neighbors stop sending their pretty, hopeful daughters around with pies and bread and jam.”

“And what if one of those pretty, hopeful girls would’ve been the right one?”

“Then she’ll be better off well clear of me,” he said flatly. 

“Uce...” Roman rose from the table and closed on him, with the look of a man who meant to wrap his arms around him.

“Don’t.” He shook his head. “It’s a done deal. I ain’t about to be talked out of it.”

“You are too damn stubborn.”

He didn’t disagree, and after a moment Roman rolled his eyes, gave a long-suffering sigh, grabbed him by the shoulders, and shook him, just a little, gentle even in his frustration.

“You wouldn’t love me half as much if I weren’t.” He stuck out his tongue, and Roman turned him loose and gave him a shove through the door and out onto the camp kitchen's broad front porch. “And anyway, it’s not a one-way street. I couldn’t bail on it even if I was of a mind to; she’s got her own reasons to be headed out this way. Hell, she was the one who placed the ad in the first place.”

“What’s she supposed to get out of this, then?”

“There’s inherited money tied up in some wacky trust. Evidently, she only gets control over it after she marries an American landowner, such as yours truly.” He shrugged; he wasn’t clear on all the dirty details, except that the whole set-up sounded unfairly rigged against her, and he was happy to help her smash it up. “She doesn’t want to play house in the long run any more than I do. Ro, it’s kinda perfect.”

Roman leaned against a sturdy post and made a skeptical sound.

“I know! Nothing ever lays out this smooth for me!" The look Roman gave him was a silent _not what I meant and you know it_ , and he cheerfully ignored it and barreled on. "Seriously, we’re both going into this eyes open. Everybody wins.”

“You always did have a funny definition of ‘winning’.”

“Every day I spend above the dirt, baby.” He shimmied into a little dance, just enough to make Roman huff out a resigned laugh. “For real, though, this is gonna be fine. Fun while it lasts, even, maybe. We’ve traded a few letters. She’s sharp. You’re gonna like her.”

“I probably will,” Roman agreed. “Just means I’m gonna think she’s selling herself short, too.”

Dean slouched against the rough-hewn railing at Roman’s side. "It doesn't have to be this big tragedy, you know?" he tried again. “I got a good life here - got a family, even if half of ‘em came as a package deal with you - and this just means people’ll quit trying to change it up on me.”

“What happens when that’s not enough after a while?”

“You’re not hearing me.” He spread his hands, and the gesture mostly took in the empty kitchen in front of them, but he trusted Roman to know that it also encompassed the whole wide spread of the ranch beyond and all of the people on it. “This is more than I was ever supposed to have. Probably more than I’ll ever deserve. Definitely more than I ever figured to be able to keep from running into the ground. How can that not be enough?”

“Could, I guess,” Roman allowed, “but it doesn’t have to be, if you don’t want it to. If you don’t close yourself off. I just worry about you, babe.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” he said wryly, and laughed when Roman half-heartedly cursed him under his breath.

They were quiet together for a long moment then, companionable even with all the heavy shit Roman wanted to unpack this morning. Two could play that game, at least.

Dean straightened up from his slouch and squared up to say his last piece. “We don’t all need to pair off to not be miserable...” Roman frowned at him, but he didn’t pause long enough to let him cut back in. “... but maybe some of us do, and maybe some of us ought to take our own advice about not closing doors we might want to walk on through later on.”

Roman looked more hangdog at that than any grown man should be able to manage. “You’ve been talking to Seth?”

“Thinking maybe you should be, too.”

Roman didn’t make any answer to that, except to push away from the roof post and tip forward to snag him in a fierce hug. He ruffled a hand through Dean’s hair and said, “If I can’t talk you out of going through with this, can I at least talk you into wearing a good shirt to meet the stage? You ought to look the part, even if you’re both just playing-acting.”

He laughed. “We can’t all be as pretty as you, but I’ll try to make myself presentable.”

* * *

“You look handsome today, Uncle Dean,” Jo piped from where she sat, perched on a bale of straw with a whole litter of tabby barn kittens sleeping in a purring pile in the middle of her calico skirt.

He figured it might just be true and not something her daddy had put her up to, having just run the gauntlet from his bedroom to the barn: a knowing smile from Naomi, who’d turned Jimmy’s face to her own before he could turn his wide grin into words everyone would regret; a chorus of wolf-whistles and impromptu carnival barking from Kofi, E, and Xavier; Seth doffing his hat in an exaggerated salute as he rode out toward the ridge.

After wrapping up morning chores, he’d ducked back into the house to wash up. His hair was slicked back neatish for the moment, though it’d probably have dried back into something unruly by the time he reached the stage office, and he’d put on his Sunday-go-to-meeting vest and a crisp blue shirt with little lines of embroidery picked out over the collar.

“You think so?” He winked at her, and went about hitching Indy, the trustiest bay mare in the stable, up to the light buggy.

“Mmhmm. Are you really getting married?”

For all of Roman’s disapproval, Dean was sure he hadn’t let slip to his starry-eyed little girl how unromantic this engagement had been, and he didn’t want to be the one to burst her bubble now.

“Not today, but maybe soon, when the judge is back in town,” he said. “That is, if she still wants to after she gets a look at this mean mug.” He twisted his face up into an especially goofy shape just to hear her laugh.

“Don’t make that face at her!” She giggled, and added, “You’re supposed to give a lady some flowers, too. I picked those earlier.” She pointed across the aisle, where a bunch of blue wildflowers tied up in a neat bow of embroidery floss rested on a milking stool.

He tucked the bouquet into a corner of the cushioned seat, and crossed over to drop a kiss on her dark hair, and she threw her arms around him as best she could without dislodging the kittens. “Thank you, darlin’. If she does come on home with me, I bet it’ll be because of these.”

* * *

The ride into town was smooth, easy and uneventful under a clear blue sky with a light breeze that cut through the midday heat without throwing up too much dust in its wake. He chattered nonsense at Indy for a while, and her ears pricked up while her legs steadily ate up the track that led on into Foley’s Falls.

As the town took shape in front of him, the church steeple and the hotel and the skeletal frame that would become the new bank building rising up over the other businesses and houses, he picked out a single rider, heading out toward him at a clip. He pulled Indy back to a walk, then stopped her altogether when the rider reached them, silver star gleaming over his heart.

“Kurt,” he said with a nod. “Been a while since the law needed to come ride me out of town.”

“That it has,” Sheriff Angle agreed with a smile that fell away from his face too quickly as he continued. “Sort of wish I wasn’t headed out for you today.”

“Feel free to kill the suspense any time.”

Kurt nodded tightly. “The stage came in ahead of schedule - panicked horses running flat out - and I’ve got some bad news from the stage agent, Dean. They avoided a robbery, but it was a near thing. Your intended - she’s fine, in the main - but she’s lost her luggage... and a little of her memory.”


End file.
